Altaf mentioned the importance of looking at alcohol as a cause of liver cancer, and that’s absolutely right. But I also think that it’s important to realise why it is that alcohol is so endemic in our society. Last week, I was standing in a queue, waiting to pay for petrol, and the man in front of me was not just paying for petrol, he was also buying a bottle of spirits. He wasn’t buying bread or milk. No, he was buying alcohol. It’s an interesting combination, isn’t it? It would be fascinating to look at the statistics for purchases of alcohol from petrol stations. I hope that he wasn’t planning to drink it while he was driving, but I am fairly confident that he was representative of the one in five people in Wales who drink alcohol above recommended levels.

We have to ensure that we are working with people to make them understand that they do need to give their livers a break so that they can recover. Many people abstain form alcohol in January because of the excesses of alcohol that they have consumed during the festive period, but anybody who is struggling to achieve that pledge may need to worry whether they need help to reduce their dependency on alcohol before it kills them.

But I want to focus the rest of my remarks on the role of obesity and the role of food as the main driver of obesity, which I think is the main challenge for us here. The statistics are terrifying. Over 1.5 million adults in Wales are overweight, and 655,000 are obese. That’s scary because we only have a population of about 3 million, and not all of them are adults. So, we do have a major public health crisis. We know that we are unlikely to lose weight if we are quaffing large quantities of alcohol. But it is not the main driver, which I think is adulterated food, not least because many of the people who are overweight or obese drink no alcohol at all. Obviously, that is not the case when it comes to the one in four children in Wales who are overweight or obese by the time they start primary school. It has to be because of what they are given to eat. I have yet to meet a breast-fed baby who is overweight. So, increasing breast-feeding would reduce the number of babies and toddlers who are in that situation. Goodness knows what’s in the milk formula, but the diet that we are adopting when it comes to weaning is a very significant element in all of this. The food that children eat aged two sets the scene for what they are prepared to eat, both as children, as well as adults.

Sixty per cent of the UK population never prepare food from scratch. The main culprit is processed food, which has become the dominant diet across the UK. The food industry spends billions of pounds every year on advertising, encouraging us to eat stuff that our grandmothers simply wouldn’t recognise as food. So, it’s not just children who need protection from this relentless advertising, which is causing such an extraordinary level of self-harm. If you haven’t prepared food yourself, you are unlikely to be aware that processed food is routinely laced with sugar, salt and fat, to make it taste of something at all, and to drive profitability. We simply can’t go on like this. Obesity costs the NHS £6 billion a year across the UK, and a whole-system change is required in our relationship with food. It’s not just liver cancer that is the problem. Obesity is now the second-largest cause of all cancers, after smoking. That’s why we have to have a whole-system change in our relationship with food, and why we cannot afford not to have a food Bill to drive the change that we need.